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Documentation Handyman

Unified Communications Suite Summit 2013

Reconnecting with Comms

The UCS group gathered last week at our Santa Clara office for our annual Comms Summit. For me, it was a great opportunity to reconnect with Comms co-workers across all disciplines and geographies, and to participate in interactive sessions on the product.

My boss and I did a preso on knowing the audience that you are writing for, which got me thinking about how to use the wiki to provide some "role-based" views of the information. For example, say you are new to UCS and you are looking for product overview and capability type information. What you want to see is different from say what a current user of the product might want. The current user might want a view that is weighted towards administration and troubleshooting. A third user, for example, a developer, might want a view that provides easy access to API and customization information.

But, before charging ahead on seeing what it would take to get the wiki to do this, I got some other feedback: that some folks still appreciate just the PDF view of documentation. This audience (especially implementors) wants a standard spreadsheet of titles, such as Installation Guide, Administration Guide, and so forth, with the ability to see the title either in HTML (in our case, Wiki), or to download a PDF.

So, What's The Takeaway?

For the traditional PDF view, we do already cover the bases. You can use the Home2 view of the documentation to access the high-level doc titles by current release and product, and get a PDF.

What about those of you who want more of a role-based view of the documentation? My first suggestion would be to provide some education on how to better search for what you want. Right now, my number one recommendation is to use this Google Custom Search Engine (GCSE) that I put together:

The next step would be for me to try and do some doc rearchitecting to utilize the power of the wiki to carve out some distinct, separate role-based views. It occurs to me that a quick-and-dirty way of providing some role-based views would be to utilize the Confluence label feature and the content-by-label macro, to assemble some index-like pages.

So, as a UCS user, let me know if this is something that you would like to see. As always, either drop me a line or leave a comment.